The web and web applications are going through a period of accelerated evolution. Web applications are moving from the non-interactive, flat, developer-controlled web pages that characterize Web 1.0 to the highly-interactive, dynamic and community-enriched web pages that represent Web 2.0. In the last two to three years, the explosive popularity of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, video sites like YouTube and mash-ups like Google Maps has called attention to the trends and technologies that make these highly interactive and rich media sites possible. For example, enterprise independent software vendors like SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, Intuit and others have taken notice of the possibilities of Web 2.0 technologies and have adopted the technologies to enrich the functionality and user experience of their enterprise web application offerings. Another example of an enterprise application that has incorporated a number of Web 2.0 features is Microsoft SharePoint, which is a document sharing and collaboration tool. The latest version of SharePoint 2007 provides a number of collaboration and portal features like team blogs, wikis and team calendars that can be customized on an individual basis.
However, the increased collaboration features and richness of Web 2.0 technologies comes at a cost. There are more protocols being used such as AJAX, Comet, Ruby, etc. The number of connections between clients and servers are increasing as these protocols generate more connections. These protocols initiate more requests between the client and browser, and therefore are consider more chatty. Rich internet applications are increasingly being used like Flash, Flex and Silverlight to make Web 2.0 apps more engaging and interactive Also the number of different clients using the web is increasing. In today's “always connected” world, content needs to be optimized for many types of clients (e.g. mobile (Symbian, Blackberry, Palm, Windows Mobile), IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc.)